"Help, help!" called Stephania into the telephone. "They have fired
the thatch. For Heaven's sake, send me help. But a few minutes and the
rafters, I fear, will catch fire. Are you still there, Shavli? Oh,
speak--speak!"
An exclamation, mingled sorrow and anger, came from the telephonist at
Shavli.
"Oh, the ruffians, the abominable assassins!" he cried. "I beseech you
to have courage. Help is surely on the way."
"I will try to be brave and do my duty to the end, as Michael told me,"
replied Stephania, as though to herself. "But unless they come soon,
it will be too late. The thatch has burnt like tinder. I can hear the
flames roaring like a furnace underneath the rafters. There! One of
them has given way and fallen on to the joists of my room. Already the
heat is suffocating, the smoke almost unbearable. Holy Virgin! What a
death."
"Alas, what more can we do than beg you to bear up?" returned the voice
at Shavli, in an agonized tone. "We have just been informed that a
party of Cossacks left twenty minutes ago to rescue you. Once more,
courage! And may Our Lady of Vilna indeed protect you."
When Stephania Ychas next spoke through the telephone the roof fell in
with a crash and pierced a hole, through which the burning embers fell,
in the ceiling of her room. At the same time communication with Shavli
was suddenly interrupted, either through the Uhlans having discovered
and cut the wire, or, as is more probable, owing to the fire having
fused the terminals. She could not, however, have sustained her appeals
for help much longer. Indeed, it was not many minutes afterwards that,
stupefied and blinded by the smoke, as she groped her way to the door
in an instinctive movement towards the open air, she sank to the floor
unconscious.
It is a characteristic of the Cossacks, many times admitted even
by German military critics, and those who have been describing the
operations in Lithuania for the enemy Press, that they rarely if ever
waste a shot. Unlike the French cavalry, they do not fire from a
distance, but fearlessly swoop down upon their adversaries and seek to
bring them down, one by one, at a range of but a few yards. And that
was the fate of the Uhlans, who, hungering to feast their eyes and ears
on the suffering of a defenceless woman, lingered a little too long
around the burning cottage of Stephania Ychas. Not one escaped.
Stephania Ychas did not lose her life after all. The brave Cossacks
broke in the already half-consumed window and dragged her forth. She
was badly burnt, but lived to tell this tale to a nurse in a Russian
hospital, whither the railway officials of Shavli transported her,
almost immediately after her rescue, in one of their motor-cars.